What’s normal — monocultural control?

by John Bluck

As the new year rolls out and New Zealand wakes from holiday slumber, we’ve had time to wonder whether last year ended as a bad dream. 

Did we really elect a new Government that meant to set Māori back by 50 years?

The Government doesn’t think so. After all, the coalition has some strong Māori leadership. Dr Reti has his own better (but unconsulted) idea for improving Māori health outcomes. Māori language and its signage isn’t cancelled, just made subsidiary.

The dictionary defines subsidiary as “not of primary importance”. Is that how much of the Māori agenda will be treated in the next three years?

Māori leaders seem to think so. There are days of reckoning ahead through hui at Ngāruawāhia, Ratana and Waitangi, and urgent appeals to the Waitangi Tribunal.

But we’ve only heard murmurs of discontent from Pākehā leaders so far.

That’s astonishing, given the number of schools, universities and polytechs, churches, museums, conservation projects, charitable foundations that already practise co-governance and weave Māori language and culture into their work. Two-thirds of us want to see te reo as compulsory in primary schools. Our lawbooks have referenced Te Tiriti for nearly 50 years.

So why the delayed response from the Pākehā majority? Is it because the future they’d counted on controlling was paying too much attention to things Māori? The NZ Herald editorial on Christmas Eve seemed to think so. Mr Luxon could “reconcile the country” and the election could be “carthartic for the fear and resentment of Labour’s promotion of Māori”.

But Labour’s promotion was seen by many as not strong enough.

The bicultural future painted by the He Puapau report, looking ahead to 2040 and Ti Tiriti’s 200th birthday, was apparently a step too far.

The future now promised is very different. Pākehā will control the story again and provide the new normal. Seemingly small things like signs and names, language learning, preferential entry and a place at local government tables, all slowly woven into the fabric of our national life over half a century, will now be unpicked and reviewed for relevance and cost-effectiveness.

I doubt that Māori will let those reversals happen. What baffles me is that Pākehā don’t see this as a U-turn. What was becoming the new normal of partnership will revert to the old normal of monocultural control we took for granted 50 years ago.

Back then it was rare to hear te reo spoken outside marae; only 5 percent of Māori schoolchildren could speak their language. The Post Office threatened to fire telephone operator (and now Dame) Naida Glavish for using “Kia ora”. The Treaty of Waitangi had barely been recognised in legislation, the Waitangi Tribunal hardly begun.

That was the old normal and we’re about to head back to it.

But is it really what we want for our future? The new normal we were beginning to enjoy was about partnership and co-governance, holding two cultures, two languages together as a basis for building even wider diversity; creating equity to make equality possible. Hardly a radical agenda.

We failed often, moved too slowly for some, but the direction of travel was clear. 2040 might have become something we could all celebrate.

Three months ago an Australian referendum failed to give Aboriginal people a voice in starting to shape a new normal for that nation. The damage done has set that country back by decades.

We’ve done something similar in cultural and social terms. Not so much cancelling a voice as subduing it. Trying to recreate an old normal much worse than what we’ve got now. That’s especially true for Māori whose name, ironically enough, means “normal”.

■ John Bluck grew up in Nuhaka and is author of Becoming Pākehā — a journey between two cultures (HarperCollins)